Story Highlights

NASHVILLE — Whimsical maverick Jack Clement — singer, producer, ringleader, writer of classic songs, discoverer of stars and member of the Country Music Hall of Fame — died this morning at his Nashville home. He was 82, and suffered from liver cancer.

Known as "Cowboy Jack" in spite of his avowed dislike of horses and his propensity for wearing sneakers and Hawaiian shirts, the Country Music Hall of Famer leaves a singular legacy. At Sun Records in Memphis, he was the first to record Jerry Lee Lewis and Roy Orbison. In Nashville, he brought Charley Pride to popular attention and desegregated country music in the process.

He wrote and produced historic records for best friend Johnny Cash, and he produced what many believe to be the highlight of the much-vaunted Outlaw Movement of 1970s Nashville, Waylon Jennings' Dreaming My Dreams. He conceived and produced what was likely country music's first story-oriented "concept album": Bobby Bare's A Bird Named Yesterday, released in 1967. He arranged the horns on Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire.

Clement schooled studio protégés Garth Fundis, Allen Reynolds, Jim Rooney, Mark Reynolds and David Ferguson, men who who went on to work with Garth Brooks, Trisha Yearwood, John Hartford, Nanci Griffith, Crystal Gayle, John Prine, Iris DeMent and others. Clement wrote Just Someone I Used to Know for Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton. He co-produced Angel of Harlem and When Love Comes To Town for international supergroup U2.

What else? Loads.

Clement was an Arthur Murray dance instructor, a U.S. Marine, the publisher of She Thinks I Still Care, the writer of Just Between You and Me for Pride and of Guess Things Happen That Way for Cash, the producer of a cult classic horror movie called Dear Dead Delilah, a recipient of a lifetime achievement award for songwriting from the Americana Music Association, a Nashville Songwriters Hall of Famer, a recording artist and the subject of a documentary called Shakespeare Was a Big George Jones Fan: Cowboy Jack Clement's Home Movies.

Oh, and he persuaded Kris Kristofferson to move to town.

"He's the first guy I met in Nashville, and we've been friends ever since," Kristofferson said in 2013. "One of my favorite people on the planet. An amazing character. Totally supportive of the right things in music, and funny on top of it."

Clement's home studio on Belmont Boulevard drew towering musical figures such as Cash, Prine, Wagoner, Parton, Hartford and songwriting hero Townes Van Zandt, and that studio — called The Cowboy Arms & Recording Spa — was a meeting ground for generations of Nashville musicians who shared Clement's irreverent appreciation of laughter and song. Among music types, dreamers, poets and clowns, keys to Clement's house were as common as guitar picks, and as valued as gold records.

"You know, I'm also Nashville's Polka King," Clement reminded a Tennessean interviewer in 2007. Asked how he came upon that moniker, Clement said, "Well, I love polka, and one day I guess I started calling myself that. And nobody ever challenged me on it, so I guess it must be true."

With that, Clement leaned in and said, "Some people out there probably think I'm a little loony."

They were right, thank goodness.

Mr. Clement's looniness was a springboard to creativity, for him and for the musicians drawn into his world. He had a serious and pensive side, but when at work making music he insisted on informality and demanded nothing short of joy.

'I wasn't trying to get reality'

Jack Clement was born in Whitehaven, Tenn., near Memphis, along the famed Highway 61.

His father was a church choir director, and his early childhood included repeated exposure to the sounds of Roy Acuff and Wayne Raney, via Memphis radio station WMC.

On holidays and in the summers, he'd visit his grandparents in Newport, Ark., where through his open window he could hear the neighbor girls singing You Are My Sunshine as he lay awake at night. He was drawn to the music. And though he never met the girls, he imagined them as being pretty.

Clement enlisted in the Marines at age 17 and wound up stationed in the Washington, D.C., area.

As a drill team member, he was chosen to be among the few soldiers who officially saluted Princess Elizabeth during her 1951 visit to the Capitol. Someone snapped a photo that day of the rifle-wielding Marine at attention while Elizabeth walked down some steps, and that photo later hung in Clement's music office, displayed along with various instruments, gadgets, whatzits and pictures.

While in the Marines, Clement formed a bluegrass group with Buzz Busby, and when Clement was discharged, he and Busby performed on the radio as Buzz and Jack and the Bayou Boys.

In 1954, Clement briefly enrolled at Memphis State University, unknowingly putting himself in a town that would soon give birth to rock 'n' roll. A fast learner, he became a dance instructor, in spite of not knowing how to dance, and a record producer, in spite of never having produced a record.

When Sun Records owner Sam Phillips heard a Billy Lee Riley song that Clement had produced, he offered him a job as a Sun engineer and producer, at $60 a week. Clement, who had been working at a building supply store, quickly accepted. Phillips showed him how to produce an echo effect during recordings, and he was off and running.

"I was in hog heaven," Clement said. "I wasn't trying to get reality, you know? I was trying to make it sound better than reality."

At Sun, Clement's salary eventually rose to $90 a week, on the strength of his work with Lewis, Cash, Orbison, Charlie Rich, Carl Perkins and others. He also engineered the famed Presley/Cash/Lewis/Perkins session eventually released as The Million Dollar Quartet.

Clement participated in rock's first great wave, though by 1959 the Sun scene had cooled and he felt it was time to move on. Phillips "fired" him after a boozy night, but Clement could have stayed on had he wanted.

He tried to establish Summer Records ("Summer hits, summer not"), then took a job as a producer and staff writer for Chet Atkins at RCA Records in Nashville, in 1960. A year later, he left for Beaumont, Texas, where he produced Dickey Lee's million-selling Patches. Then he pitched George Jones-recorded She Thinks I Still Care, a song he published that went No. 1 on the country charts in 1962.

In 1964, Cash called his old friend one night to tell him he had a dream about a mariachi band playing on a song called Ring of Fire. Clement wound up arranging the unusual horn part on that now-classic, and he played the rhythm guitar part on the record.

"I knew he was the only one who'd see how it could work," Cash wrote in an autobiography. "There wasn't any point in even discussing it with anybody else."

Clement re-established his production and publishing company, Jack Music, in 1965, and he was looking to discover and nurture new talent. Enter a failed baseball player named Charley Pride. Jack Johnson, of Cedarwood Publishing, kept telling Clement about Pride, and on one cocktail-fueled evening Clement agreed to leave his stool at Music Row's Professional Club and listen to a tape of Pride singing.

"I could tell the guy could sing and that he was for real and that he was really country," Clement said. "So we went back to the Professional Club and had a few more cocktails and I said, 'Get him in here. I'll cut a song on him.' "

Pride did come in, and Clement gave him some songs to learn. Five or six days later, Clement paid for a Pride recording session at RCA Studio B.

"After that, I had the only Charley Pride record in town," Clement said. "I had an office with these big speakers, and I'd get people in there and play Charley's record. Loud, man. Like, really loud. I'd play that record and then I'd show 'em his picture. That was fun."

Pride soon signed to RCA, and he is now a Country Music Hall of Famer on the strength of a career that included numerous Clement songs productions. He refers to Clement as "the genius."

When Kristofferson arrived in Nashville on vacation in 1965, wearing an Army uniform and intending to soon begin teaching at West Point, he ran into Clement at the Professional Club. Many hours later, those two wound up watching the trains move in and out of Union Station while Clement spun tales, and Kristofferson began to think that Nashville might be among the world's most interesting spots. He soon resigned his military commission.

When all else fails ...

Clement's unconventional sense of humor was evident in two self-penned songs that wound up on Johnny Cash's epic 1968 Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison album: Dirty Old Egg-Sucking Dog and Flushed From the Bathroom of Your Heart. And with money rolling in from the Pride projects, he decided to engage in some empire building.

Clement began working to build studios, to start record labels and to make Dear Dead Delilah, which would wind up to be a tremendous financial bust. In 1970, he built Jack Clement Recording Studios, which is now known as Sound Emporium and which has been the spot for many hit recordings.

JMI Records was intended to be a star-making record label when Clement opened it in 1972. It did make a star out of Don Williams, though that singer wound up moving to ABC/Dot after early successes on JMI. Without Williams in his stable, Clement had to give up on a plan to establish a space population.

"If I hadn't forgot to sign Don Williams to a contract, we might could have amassed $100 million or something, and if you can get that, maybe you can get a billion," Clement said. "I always figured it would take at least a billion dollars to start any kind of meaningful space program."

Though space didn't work out, Clement retained his ability to do earthly good.

Along with producing Jennings' Dreaming My Dreams — a high point of Nashville's Outlaw Movement — he also sold another studio, Jack's Tracks, to Allen Reynolds, who used the place to record Crystal Gayle, Kathy Mattea, Garth Brooks and others. And in 1978, he finally got around to releasing a solo album for Elektra Records, All I Want to Do In Life. That one didn't make commercial waves (other than in Australia), but it showcased Clement's masterful phrasing and round, full voice.

In the 1980s, Clement produced Cash, Hartford and some tracks for U2. Mostly, he watched as Reynolds, Rooney and Fundis produced records, and he engaged in creative dawdling.

"People would come in here and record" in the '80s and '90s, he told No Depression magazine. "I kept the studio working and furnished some engineers. I sort of holed up in this house and let the rest of the world either go by or drop by."

But in the new century, Clement drew inspiration from young bucks Billy Burnette and Shawn Camp, and he seemed pleased to find Nashville recognizing him as its weirdest and perhaps wisest elder. He performed shows during a sold-out residency at the Country Music Hall of Fame, took bows as an Americana Music Association award winner, worked on a movie score with T Bone Burnett and released his first album in more than a quarter-century, the critically lauded Guess Things Happen That Way.

Clement received more notoriety in 2005, with the release of the Shakespeare Was a Big George Jones Fan documentary, which featured Cash, Kristofferson, Pride, Jones and many others joking around and also talking about Clement's pleasingly off-kilter worldview.

And Clement hosted a regular show on Sirius XM satellite radio's Outlaw Country channel, spinning stories, playing music and bringing listeners into the atypical world of the Cowboy Arms Hotel & Recording Spa.

That world was threatened by a June 2011 fire that destroyed his home. As the Cowboy Arms burned, Clement stood safely and sadly outside, wearing an Elvis Presley bathrobe. A friend, singer-songwriter Marshall Chapman, came by to console him. He turned to her and asked, "You wanna buy a house?"

He and his companion, Aleen Jackson, were unharmed by the fire, but they spent nearly a year shuttling between various residences while the Cowboy Arms was rebuilt. Another old friend and protege, Mark Howard, redesigned the upstairs studio.

Howard said several hard drives that held important music were saved from the fire when a reel-to-reel machine fell against the drives and shielded them from the fire.

"Not much upstairs made it, but those hard drives did, and the microphone cabinet had a big heavy door that fell against it and protected some of the microphones," Howard said. "That's another thing I learned from Cowboy: When all else fails, get lucky."

The fun business

In January 2013, a bevy of friends gathered at War Memorial Auditorium to honor Clement with a tribute concert.

By then, Clement was in ill health, but he made his way to the stage at night's end delivering a mini-set that concluded with a version of the Rolling Stones' No Expectations, a song he recorded dozens of times with various artists.

His performance capped a night that included sharp songs and kind words from Kristofferson, Pride, Emmylou Harris, John Prine, Rodney Crowell, Vince Gill, Jakob Dylan, The Black Keys' Dan Auerbach and others who had been inspired by Clement's artistry. The show also included video tributes from President Bill Clinton, first lady Michelle Obama, Bono of U2, country star Taylor Swift (at Clement's insistence: He loved Swift) and other dignitaries.

Three months later, in April, Clement, Bobby Bare and Kenny Rogers were announced as the next members of the Country Music Hall of Fame.

The official induction will come later this year, but Clement attended the announcement at the Hall of Fame and Museum's rotunda. Asked by The Tennessean what it takes to gain membership into the Hall, Clement said, "Trying to do something that hasn't been done before is good."

He did that, time and again.

At the end of Clement's radio show, he'd often play a song from Guess Things Happen That Way, one that ended, "Goodbye, cruel circus/ I'm off to join the world."

But Clement never quite joined the world. He danced through it, drank through it, sang through it, made it prettier and more interesting, and gave it further dimension. He caused its inhabitants to laugh and whistle and wonder and arch eyebrows.

But he wasn't much of a joiner. He was Nashville's smiling instigator.

"Remember, we're in the fun business," he liked to say. "If we're not having fun, we're not doing our job."